Blame It On Him
by Willowth'Wisp
Summary: Katie goes over all the times Travis has messed up her plans (and perhaps messed with her head). (Travis/Katie)


**A/N: I'm on a Tratie roll, lol. Also, I love feedback, guys. ^^ Feedback is like sunshine. In a cave. Full of zombies. (not my best analogy)**

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters! (though I kinda wish I did XP)

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Katie was very concerned with plans. She knew if her plan was good enough, if she was smart enough, if she was tough enough, if she was _organized_ enough, her plan would work. And if her plan would work, everything else would go her way. Enemies would fall like so many bowling pins, her plants would bloom and flower, and whatever endeavor she pushed for _would_ happen. Because she was Katie Gardner, daughter of Demeter, and she turned anything standing in her way to rubble.

Whenever her plans were ruined, she usually blamed it on him. For good reason.

 _He_ was Travis Stoll, son of Hermes, and had been a royal pain in her ass for most of her life. She didn't believe he ever had a plan. Spontaneity and chaos and sheer luck were his preferred methods. Which, in all honesty, was an irresponsible way to live. What would he do if all his cleverness, creative disorder, and improvisation failed him? What was his back-up?

 _Nothing_ , other than his younger brother, Connor Stoll, but he didn't count. People didn't count, because people were unreliable. People could break down and disappoint. People could fail.

But she trusted herself, and she trusted her plans.

However, when the almighty Titan-lord attacked New York with his hoard of bloodthirsty minions, she had been called in with her campmates to defend Olympus. And she did. She'd fought and schemed and dug into every shred of her power and skill to keep those nasty, soul-sucking fiends away from the gods' thrones. She'd outsmarted them and outplayed them.

And she always, always had a back-up plan should her first one fail (though those instances were few and far between).

Except the day she'd allowed herself to get distracted. She'd been in a grocery store, having agreed to go scouting with the Stoll brothers in order to keep an eye on them (which was still the worst idea ever, mostly because she wasn't allowed to kill them since they needed all the fighters they could get), and had gotten caught up in scolding Travis for stealing medicine he didn't need. He'd protested that others might need it sometime soon. And while Katie hesitated, torn between the merits of that idea and the repelling idea of giving in to Travis Sneaking Stoll, she had failed to notice the hellhound speeding towards the window until it was too late.

Glass had shattered, the boys had been thrown to the floor, and filthy fangs sank deeply into her left shoulder. The explosion of pain had wiped all pretense of plans from her mind, and she had no idea how to get past the mass of red sheeting over her eyes, much less how to escape the hound that was dragging her across the cracked, sticky stone of the streets.

She had, somehow, managed to draw a dagger and thrust it blindly upward, catching the beast in its snout. It had released her with a furious howl, and Katie had collapsed backwards on the cement, gasping to breathe and struggling to rise. She blindly dug into the dregs of her power.

Around her, on all sides, thorny tendrils erupted from the ground and curled protectively around her limp, red-stained, battered body. They thickened and hardened, spikes jutting out from them on all sides, and strangest of all, blooming roses lined the brambly armor Katie found herself closeted in by.

They were no match for a hound formed from Kronos's shadow.

It had ripped them through them in a matter of moments, but the rosebushes had given Katie time to draw her weapon and kick her senses brutally back to reality, out of the blurry world of sparks and fire and pain. Her weapon, a simple staff with a large round knob on the end, was a formidable club when wielded correctly.

And Katie knew how to wield it correctly.

But she was injured, and she had no plan, other than to swipe and jab at the dog, and she knew she would not survive long.

So she had _planned_ to go down fighting, to take this hound with her, and show it just how dangerous an injured, furious demigod could be. She had planned to see fear in those monstrous eyes. She had planned to make it fear _her_.

Once again, Travis Stoll messed up her plans. This time though, she wasn't sure whether to blame him or thank him. Or, well, she knew which she should do, but her stubborn streak had to be contended with.

He leaped out of nowhere, wielding slashing dual swords, and the hound had snapped and snarled at this new enemy. Connor, his younger, fiery-eyed brother joined him in the attack.

And to her confusion, Travis had dropped the ambush to run to her. To pull her out of the thorny embrace of the brambles and tear at her shirt, ignoring her ferocious scolding and protesting, and dashed nectar over the gaping wound sapping her strength. Not that she'd ever let him see she was weakening. She put up a front, yelling at him for _ripping her shirt open_ , but to her mounting confusion, Travis hadn't flinched away or even gone to help Connor. He'd stayed, and he'd bandaged her shoulder, and he'd ignored her every attempt to push him away from her ("I am perfectly capable of taking care of my own injuries, Stoll."). He wouldn't budge, which was _highly_ irksome. She was the stubborn one, not him.

Fortunately, Connor chased off the already-injured hellhound, and as soon as she was out of immediate danger, her adrenaline faded fast and black started to fog her vision. She didn't even have enough strength to complain as consciousness wavered and she sank into his arms with a sigh. And then she was gone, swirling away in a black whirlpool, gratefully disappearing from the thudding pain in her shoulder.

When she next awoke, she was propped up on an obnoxiously pink sofa and her shoulder was so plastered with bandages, she almost mistook it for a mummy's. Her forehead was being mopped by her younger half-sister, who had had dark shadows sunk under her eyes, but the brown opticals brightened as soon as she stirred.

"Oh, Katie!" she had cried. "I was so worried the bite had become infected!"

And, well, when she was allowed to get up and move around at last, she had gone to find Travis at once. She didn't know what she was going to say, but a tentative plan was beginning to form. As it always did. Katie always knew what she was going to do.

She'd found him slumped on the plum-purple cushions of a sofa, a soda tipping slightly in his hand, and staring out the window.

She'd greeted him.

He'd leaped out of the chair like she'd zapped him, and she'd snarked him about being even jumpier than usual. He'd ruffled his hair, mussing the light brown strands, and made a face at her. Then he'd asked how she was doing, and she said she was doing fine, of course.

And...she'd thanked him. Grating her pride had not been easy, and part of her hoped that this would lead to a mutual understanding between them. Maybe he'd stop pulling pranks on her because they came to an...unspoken compromise, or something of that sort.

But this was Travis Stoll. He was not subtle, nor did he understand the hints that she'd dropped for them to lay down their rivalry.

He'd teased her about being a damsel in distress, and Katie had stared at him, unable to believe how galling he was, and then nearly breathed fire right there.

She blamed it on him.

And because Katie could not _stand_ being indebted to Travis Stoll, she'd followed him on silent steps when he'd next entered the battlefield. She'd watched his back from afar, and when he messed up (as he inevitably did), she'd been there to catch the knife aimed for his head on the hilt of her staff and smack the dracanae back. She'd struck her forehead with the hard, round knob with enough force to make her eyeballs rattle in her skull, and the snake woman fell back. Katie hoped, a bit viciously, that she'd given her a concussion.

She glanced at the prone Travis, who was gaping at her, and then turned without a word and strode back into the blur of battle.

The next week was like playing in traffic. While blindfolded.

She waded through legions of enemies, smacking and stabbing, summoning forests from the earth to swarm over her enemies, and generally igniting fear in her enemies like a thunderstorm in an orange T-shirt. When monsters growled at her, she growled back. She gave as good as she got.

When it was at last over, when Luke saved them all, and when Percy Jackson turned Olympus on its head, they had been expected to go back to normal. So she had. She'd gone back to Camp Half-Blood, and she'd planned to recover there. She'd planned to take care of her now-overgrown garden, and she'd meant to heal in a slow, solitary process.

Of course Travis Stoll was there to mess things up for her. Again.

She'd been weeding in the strawberry fields, as she became more and more fond of doing. It allowed her to be on her own, alone with the refreshing smell of earth and the soothing scent of plant-life. The solitude had let her recuperate. It had let her put her thoughts in order, and it had let her handle the deaths of her friends, and it had...let her begin to heal. It was a gift, she knew, to be able to have a clear idea of how to live through the aftermath of such horror.

But when Travis came strolling through the fields, crushing a few strawberry plants on his way over, he'd stumbled upon her. Literally.

He tripped right over her and she'd snapped at him, naturally, but when he'd sat up, his expression had startled her briefly into silence. His eyes were quiet and sad and dark as an empty house.

And she knew then.

Travis did not know how to heal. He had not been as lucky as she.

So she, for some reason she couldn't fathom, had talked to him. It wasn't so hard, when he was so unlike himself. When he was so distant and far-off and desperate for someone to save him. She had seen the quiet panic in his eyes. And she knew he was afraid of being a survivor.

So she had pushed and pushed and _pushed_ for him to realize that there was still life here. If there was one thing she had learned from being the daughter of the agriculture goddess, it was that life always won out in the end.

Something changed between them that day.

She had touched his face- first just to make him look at her, and then lingering there to make sure he understood what she was saying. She had not been expecting him to take it. And for some reason, she recalled the day he had saved her from the hellhound, with far too much vividness. The day she'd let him fold her into his chest and take care of her. She had forgotten the texture of the hellhound's fur and the reek it gave off, but she remembered with perfect clarity every shade of blue that swirled through his frightened irises, and the deep inhalations of his spiced scent, and the worn threads of his shirt that she had sank against.

She remembered how afraid she had been. But she had, through some unconscious order, _preserved_ every little detail about Travis Stoll in those few, heartstopping moments.

And in the weeks that followed, she had no longer been alone in her healing. So he'd wrecked those plans too, purely by accident like a kindergartner among a city of blocks, but she would forgive him this time, because he was hurting. So they'd healed. So she'd pulled him out of the abyss he kept sliding into, and he reminded her of her own words when he caught in her vulnerable moments (which occurred more often than she would have liked).

When he caught her in the darkness of evening a month or so later, she'd been curled by her cabin, watching the fireflies wink bright yellow and then fade. But this time, she wasn't wrestling with the memories of the war. This time, she was trying to understand how she could have gone from thinking of Travis as a nuisance, then to a confidant, then to someone she cared for, and then... Then...

He told her he cared for her, in that night sprinkled with silver stars and golden fireflies. With much pretension of smoothness while simultaneously evading the topic (typical Stoll logic), but he'd said it. He said he liked her, and fairly yanked the world from beneath Katie's feet.

She had stood. And after whispered discussion in the fading light, surrounded by fireflies flashing like sparks flying off a bonfire, they had decided they should be friends for now. Well, she had decided, because although Travis had proved himself far more mature than she had ever expected... He was still a teenage boy. Still a Stoll.

She'd decided that friends was a far enough leap, because, after all, they had only just gotten past a war, and plunging into something fiercely emotional right after seemed quite unwise (as Katie felt compelled to point out). And, well, Travis was still annoying. Katie couldn't just dive into this when she didn't even know what _this_ was. She didn't know how to plan it or map it out, and that made her hold it at arms-length.

But then... As they were agreeing, nodding and murmuring whispered concessions, Katie had realized with a tremendous jolt in her stomach that they had gotten awfully close. Closer than she had planned.

And when he kissed her, Travis obliterated any thought of a plan from her mind. He kissed her, prompting her lips, parting them, coaxing her until she kissed him back. And when she kissed him back (against all her plans surrounding Travis, mind you), he'd gotten bolder, licking inside and setting her whole body on fire.

When he pressed her against him, she ignored all sense of reason and pulled him closer still. She ignored everything that was not Travis Stoll. And he made it easy when he kissed her until all her senses melted together, when she was pushed against the wooden wall of her cabin, and when Travis was kissing her with such enthusiasm that suggested he'd been wanting this for a long time.

She blamed him for screwing with her head.

She blamed him for making her feel like she could brush the cool curve of the sky when she wanted her feet planted firmly on the ground.

And sooner than she had planned, she was blaming him for making her fall exasperatingly, wholly in love with him.

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 _Fin~_


End file.
